


Write Them On the Tablet of Your Heart

by dedicatedfollower467



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Drug Use, F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Tattoos, mentions of self harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-06-05
Packaged: 2018-01-21 20:00:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1562258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dedicatedfollower467/pseuds/dedicatedfollower467
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John has two names on his wrist. He pretends the second one doesn't exist.</p><p>Mary has two names on her wrist. She loves the second, mostly to spite her mother.</p><p>Sherlock has two names on his wrist. He's going to find them both.</p><p>(Soulmate AU of the "name written on your arm" variety.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Proverbs 7. Ignore any and all context.
> 
> Thank you very much to [IWantYourMusicPlease](http://archiveofourown.org/users/IWantYourMusicPlease/pseuds/IWantYourMusicPlease) for being my beta!

Johnny doesn’t remember when the first name appeared. The four letters, M-A-R-Y, first in clinical typewritten font, then in shaky children’s handwriting, have been on his left wrist since he was three years old, and his memory doesn’t go back that far. It’s almost like the girl, wherever she is, has been a part of him forever.

Instead of sucking his thumb, he traces his fingers over the letters, soothed by touching the tender skin on the inside of his arm. The first word he learned how to read was the name that he saw every day, without fail. He could perfectly recreate the letters of his soulmate’s name before he could spell Johnny.

He doesn’t remember when the first name appeared on his arm. He is, however, hyper aware of the second name’s appearance.

The cuffs that everybody wears in public, even folks who don’t have a name yet, are super itchy, and even though he knows he’s not supposed to, Johnny makes a habit of pulling his off under his blanket during naptime. And so he is able to see when the careful, typewritten letters burst into his skin in sharp black.

Johnny is too young to know how odd it is, to have another name appear on his wrist, just below the first one. In a few hours he will find out, will learn that what has happened is shameful and wrong, and that his mother can barely stand to look at him. Within a few years he will learn to blot out the second name from his mind, to ignore it, to tell himself that he has only one true soulmate, and her name is Mary. In the coming decades, his family will try everything possibly to obliterate the mark.

But for now, he traces the new letters on his arm, grinning at the slightly tingly sensation they produce.

“Sh-er-l-o-ck,” he sounds out, under his breath. He likes the name.

* * *

 

Mary has two names on her wrist. The first came out of the womb with her, the barely legible name “JOHNNY” (both N’s backwards) scrawled on the inner flesh of her right arm. In the years since, it’s morphed into a far more legible form, a middle-grader’s careful print. It’s been there her whole life. It belongs there.

And, as far as she is concerned, the childish letters of “ShErlocK” also belong there, and she doesn’t understand why Mummy wants to get rid of them.

She pouts all the way to the specialist’s office, worrying at the frayed edge of her cuffs. On a fundamental level, Mary knows that it’s wrong to cross out her soulmate’s name. It’s not a mistake that she has two. It’s the way she’s supposed to be. Even at six years old, she’s aware that there’s a big enough heart inside of her to love two people.

Mary tries to run away when the car door is opened, but Mummy snatches her up and carries her into the clinic, holding her squirming body tight. Indignant, Mary struggles and starts to cry, letting the entire world know exactly how she feels.

“I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna!” she screams. “I don’t wanna lose Sherly!”

Mommy swats her on the bottom and tells her to hush. Instead she dissolves into unintelligible sobs.

“This is what’s best for you,” Mummy tells her. “Be quiet and let the doctor look at you.”

The nurse calls out Mary’s name, and they follow him down to the doctor. She’s a nice old-looking lady, and she has clean silicone cuffs over both her arms. Mary is still sniffing and crying when the doctor-lady asks her to take off her cuffs so that she can take a look at the names on her wrist.

Then the doctor looks up at Mummy and says, “You’re right. It is still a rather young bond, and it probably would be possible to delete the name from her wrist. However, if we want that procedure done, we’ll have to go ahead with it immediately, or the bond will become too permanent.”

“Do it,” says Mummy.

Mary shrieks and pulls her hand away from the doctor, who suddenly no longer looks like a nice lady. “No!” she screams. “I don’t wanna lose Sherly!”

Mommy swats her bottom again, twice, and tells the doctor to go ahead with the procedure.

They make Mary take deep breaths, and then she falls asleep. When she wakes up later that afternoon, Sherly’s name is gone from her wrist.

So Mary steals a pen from one of the nurses and writes it back down on her arm. She doesn’t get the shape of the letters exactly right, but she remembers how to spell it. It’s the third thing she ever learned how to spell, after her own and Johnny’s names.

 _Sherlock Sherlock Sherlock_ , she writes, over and over again, until the letters are thick and black and forever.

Three days later, the pen won’t come off, and Mummy takes her back to the specialist.

“I’m sorry,” says the specialist. “It looks like the procedure didn’t take. There are more drastic options, but they should probably wait until your daughter is older.”

In the future, Mummy will try many ways to break Mary’s second bond, but Sherlock’s name will never leave her wrist for long.

* * *

 

Sherlock enjoys looking at the names on his wrists and wondering what his soulmates are like. Even though he’s only five, he’s already beginning to get the hang of handwriting analysis, the basics at least. It’s difficult to tell anything definite with so few letters and even more difficult when the writers are only children, but he analyzes them all the same.

Johnny has his strong, bold letters and widely-spaced loops. It looks to Sherlock as though the cursive is not something he’s particularly comfortable with, but that he’s got to try for the sake of appearances. The strokes are dark, as though he puts a lot of pressure on his pen when he writes. And Sherlock is talented enough to see the minute changes in the name throughout the day and the week, whenever Johnny writes his name again. He can sometimes tell, based on the spacing of the letters and the shapes, whether or not Johnny was feeling bored the last time he wrote it.

Mary doesn’t bother with cursive, instead writing her name with big, open print letters. She draws a little smiley face in the middle of her A. The marks are thinner than Johnny’s, indicating that less pressure is put on the paper. Mary’s name is more variable than Johnny’s, changing greatly depending on mood. And sometimes she’ll even go so far as to completely change it up, as though she wants to explore being a different sort of Mary. But she inevitably returns to the wide letters and open loops.

Sherlock has observed that most people do not have more than one name on their wrists, and so it is unusual that he has one for each hand. Johnny sits proudly on his right hand, while Mary takes up the left side perfectly. He is looking forward to meeting them someday.

Mycroft says that he is being sentimental for wanting to find his soulmates so badly. He insists that the soulmate fable is just a myth, and a poorly constructed one at that. His brother points out that their parents were soulmates, and look at where they are now. There’s no reason to think that finding his soulmates will make him happy, or feel loved, or fit in.

Mycroft says he really can be stupid sometimes, and Sherlock doesn’t know how to do anything but agree quietly.

But to be fair, Mycroft doesn’t have anything on his wrist, and he’s already fifteen years old. Sherlock doesn’t think Mycroft will ever have a name of his wrist, which is perfectly fine. It’s a little unusual, but no more so than Sherlock’s two.

It’s just that Mycroft can’t know what it feels like, to wake up every morning and see a little name on your wrist and know that somewhere out there in the world is someone with your name on their wrist. That somehow destiny has decided the two of you are fated to be together.

Or in Sherlock’s case, the three of you.


	2. Chapter 2

John meets a girl called Mary when he is twelve years old, through his little sister. Harry drags her home after school like a balloon on a string, proudly declaring to Mum that she made a new friend at school today and now they’re going to be best friends forever, can they please have a snack?

John’s heart leaps into his throat when Mary introduces herself. Mary Cummings. He tries to catch his mum’s eye, but she’s too busy matching snacks for the girls.

Part of him thinks he needs to talk to her, but he quails before the nine-year-old’s slim figure. Instead he grabs his share of the snack and runs up to his room, pretending he doesn’t care at all.

Mum knocks on the door a little bit later. “Johnny?” she says.

John groans. “Mum, that’s such a little kid name. I’m _John_ now.”

She sits on his bed. “Sorry, sweetie. I think you and I need to talk a little bit.”

John can feel his ears turn red. “The Talk?” he says. “Now? Really, Mum? I already know all about that stuff, I don’t need you to tell me.”

His mother raises her eyebrows, and he realizes just a touch too late that maybe that wasn’t what she wanted to talk with him about.

“Well, that’s very interesting to hear,” she says. “Where did you become such an expert?”

He doesn’t dare tell her that he learned it from the other boys at school. So instead he just shrugs and pretends like it’s no big deal. Maybe she’ll get back to what she actually wanted to talk about now.

“We’ll be discussing this later,” she says. “Right now I wanted to talk about soulmates.”

John glances down at the black cuff on his left wrist. “Because her name is Mary.”

Mum nods. “The first thing you have to understand, John, is that there are a lot of Marys in the world.” Her voice is gentle, but he can feel himself tensing up and getting redder. “You’ll probably meet quite a lot of Marys. And I know sometimes it can be tempting to ask anybody who has that name on your wrist what theirs says. But it’s really very rude.”

John nods. “I know that,” he says. He’s not dumb. Asking about somebody else’s soulmate name is like asking them to take off their trousers and walk around in their underwear. John wouldn’t do that to anybody, even if their name was Mary.

Mum cocks her head slightly. “I’m glad you understand that. And I think you should know, that name doesn’t really mean that things are going to be perfect with the Mary out there. It’s a guide, to draw the two of you together, but the reason why we hide them is because these relationships need to grow naturally.”

John nods. “Okay. I get it.” He won’t get his hopes up around every Mary he meets, he won’t assume they’re his soulmate.

Mary Cummings isn’t his soulmate. She writes her M’s completely differently than his Mary does.

Over the course of his life, John meets many Marys, and despite his mother’s advice, he can’t help getting his hopes up each time he meets one. One time he even met a Mary who had a John on her wrist. But when they bared their arms to each other, they could tell from the handwriting that her John was not him and his Mary wasn’t her. They still enjoyed their relationship together, though.

When he hit thirty and hadn’t met his soulmate yet, he became nearly desperate. Every Mary was a potential girl for him – even the ones who were clearly not three years younger than him. Because hey, it was possible that some kind of mistake had happened. He couldn’t pass up any chances.

Curiously enough, he never did meet any Sherlocks.

* * *

 

There were three Johns in Mary’s eighth grade American classroom.

They were all assholes.

Her mum didn’t seem to appreciate the fact that they were all incredibly huge turds, because she constantly encouraged Mary to invite them over. Mary consistently refused, and then Mary’s mum would go and do it anyway, and she and one of the Johns would mutually ignore each other while their mothers chatted.

Mum was very disappointed in her lack of enthusiasm. “What if one of them is your soulmate, Mary? Don’t you want to find your John?”

“I’d rather find my Sherlock,” she’d snipe, and Mum would frown in disapproval, her lips tightening.

Mary still didn’t understand why her mother hated Sherlock so much. What had he (and she was sure it was a he, she had looked the name up) ever done to her mother? Why was she so fixated on this John character, anyway?

It got to the point that Mary got sick of hearing the name John, and she started going out of her way to avoid meeting any more of them. She was aware that most people got excited when they heard the name of their soulmate, but she just felt vaguely annoyed.

Throughout college in the American school system, Mary met more older Johns than she cared to speculate on, and she never once told any of them that she maybe possibly had their name on her wrist. Her mother would have been disappointed with her. What if she had missed her chance, as her own mother had done years ago? What if she was destined to be forever lonely, lost without her John, because she hadn’t cared to meet him when she was a teenager?

Mary didn’t care. She wouldn’t be lonely as long as she had her Sherlock.

* * *

 

If Sherlock could get one wish, it would be that his soulmates didn’t have the two of most common names in the English-speaking world for their respective genders. If they had even slightly more unconventional names, he may have been able to deduce who they were, where they were from, where to find them.

As it is, he’s determined that John is almost certainly at uni here in England, and suspects that Mary is currently living in America. Other than that, it’s impossible to narrow it down any further, and it’s frustrating.

It doesn’t help that any time he hears the names “Mary” or “John” his ears perk up and he can’t help but trying to deduce them down to their basic components and determine if they are _his_ John or Mary.

Mycroft calls it obsessive, and he tells Sherlock that he is tactless when it comes to interaction with potential soulmates.

“How can you expect them to get a good impression of you when you so rudely invade their space, Sherlock?” he says. “Even if any of them were one of your soulmates, they would quite likely be repulsed by your attitude.”

Sherlock shakes his head. “They’re my soulmates, Mycroft. They’ll understand me. That’s what soulmates are supposed to do.”

Mycroft shakes his head in turn. “When will you learn to put aside that myth, Sherlock? Soulmates are people, no more special or important than any other person in the world.”

“You wouldn’t know,” Sherlock declares. “You don’t even have one.”

Mycroft steeples his fingers. “And I am content with that. Many never find theirs, Sherlock. What if you don’t?”

But he will. He must. He’s Sherlock Holmes, and he is going to find his soulmates.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant to post this yesterday. Oops!

Failing to find his soulmate isn’t really what drives John into the Army. In some ways, it’s a natural calling, used as he is to feeling his blood race when the adrenaline rushes through him. And it’s perfectly normal to want to be a part of something larger than himself, to make a difference in the world. Out here, he’ll really be saving lives.

All right, so maybe it’s a little bit because he’s in his thirties and still hasn’t found his soulmate. Soulmates.

The night before John joins up, he goes down to the tattoo shop and tells the designer he wants a tat around his soulmate’s name. It’s a pretty common thing to do, if a little private, and so John picks a pretty, romantic-looking design, with bird and flower motifs. It’ll trail all the way up his arm.

When John bares his arm for the tattoo artist, though, the man gasps. John can feel the tips of his ears going red, and he glares at the raised lines of Sherlock’s name, sharp and thin and spidery.

“I think you can imagine why I want to get the tat,” he says.

The artist frowns and looks at him. “So, you want me to cover it up?”

“I’m joining the Army in the morning,” John says. “I think you can imagine what they’ll say.”

The man behind the needle grins wryly. “You want the new tat to get all puffy and cover up the second name.”

“Yeah,” says John. “I mean, I know when it heals the letters will still be raised but it’ll always make it harder to see.”

So the man bends down over the needle, and John breathes deeply as it pierces his skin. Slowly, carefully, the black lines obliterate the name on his arm.

With his unit out there, in the deserts of Afghanistan, it’s so easy to catch an accidental glimpse of the name on another man’s wrist. John catches a glimpse of a Moira, a Lydia, something too fast to see but might have been a Susan or a Sarah, and once, he even sees a man with Kevin written there.

But John’s pretty confident that if anyone catches sight of his wrist, all they see is Mary. The name of Sherlock is hidden within the black lines of the tattoo, disappearing into the ink the way he needs it to. John will always know it’s there, and the bond won’t ever be broken.

But at least no one else will see it.

* * *

 

Mary doesn’t really remember when she started killing people for a living.

It seems that one minute, she’s taking a semester’s break from college by spending a year traveling Europe, and then the next, she’s wiping blood off the handle of a knife and watching to make sure that her target dies.

To be honest, it’s not really all that satisfying. Nothing in her life is really all that satisfying. She’s in her thirties, and no soulmate has shown up to claim her. If there’s a Sherlock who is still alive on this planet, she’s never met him, and she’s probably never going to.

Mary didn’t start killing people because she never found her soulmate, because when she first worked as an assassin she was still certain that her darling perfect Prince Sherlock would swoop down out of the mountains and scoop her up and take her away. She doesn’t really get a choice when it comes to killing people, and for the longest time she dreamed that her white knight would save her.

But it’s becoming clear to her that the white knight, the whole soulmate idea, is a myth, and that no one will come to rescue her.

There are days when she wonders if she hadn’t been wrong, to ignore all those Johns the way she had. Maybe, if she had gone after one of them, found the first name on her wrist, and hadn’t gone hoping after her nonexistent hero, she wouldn’t be here. She would have had a home, and a dog, and maybe a kid or two, with a little white picket fence.

But this is the life she’s chosen, through inaction. She wipes the blood off of the knife and escapes quietly out the back window, just in time to avoid having the alarm reset.

Mary changes in an alleyway about three blocks from the house, dumping her stained clothing into a garbage bin and pulling a ratty hoodie and holey jeans from a plastic bag she had stashed nearby.

As she pulls the hoodie over her head, she can’t help glancing at the scars on her arm. It had been a bad night when she’d done that. The two marks slash across her wrists, carving pale lines through the names written there, marring the illegible scribble with a J at the beginning, and the thin, elegant lines of Sherlock.

Mary adjusts the hoodie, puts on a fresh pair of sneakers, and heads off down the street. She’s crossed the two of them out of her life. She doesn’t need a soulmate.

* * *

 

Sherlock no longer feels shame in admitting that he does cocaine because he hasn’t found his soulmates. Even Mycroft’s disapproval, his insistent reminders that soulmates aren’t everything, his pleas for Sherlock to go clean, can’t prevent Sherlock from turning to the drug.

It invigorates him. It’s the only thing that gives him hope when it seems like life is hopeless.

To be fair, Sherlock can’t say that he wouldn’t have taken the drug even if no mark had ever appeared on his arms. He tried cocaine for the first time at a uni party, and the high it gave him had been more exciting than anything he had ever tried before. His brain had felt so alive and open, and he’d felt so good.

After that, it became so easy to slip into the habit, to use it when he was feeling down, when he needed a burst of inspiration, when he was upset about never finding his soulmates.

It didn’t take Sherlock long to ascertain that the best highs were to be had through injection, and he learned how to administer the doses himself. He may be a drug user, but he’s not stupid – he always uses a sterile needle, usually one he has sterilized himself.

There are dozens of little marks on his arms, the telltale signs of his addiction. They are the reason why he wears long sleeves most of the time. Sherlock doesn’t want to get caught, because if he gets caught, they’ll probably send him to jail, or at least to rehab, and Sherlock doesn’t want to stop.

The only bad thing about doing cocaine, and yet somehow the thing that keeps bringing him back to the drug, is that whenever he injects himself, no matter which arm he uses, he finds himself staring down at one of his soulmates’ names.

John’s has morphed into a scribble, little more than the swoop of a J and a flat line. Sherlock wonders if the man signs his surname the same way, or if it is a little more legible. He has studied John’s handwriting for years now, and believes that the man is probably a doctor. Old stereotypes can sometimes be true. If he’s not a doctor, then he’s certain someone who signs his name frequently – perhaps a lawyer or a politician, then.

Mary’s varies even more wildly than it did as a child. Sherlock suspects she is a spy, because he can think of little other reason for her to change the style in which she writes her name so constantly. Although that doesn’t make a lot of sense either, because what spy would use the same first name over and over again? Unless she is banking on the anonymity of the name Mary.

Sherlock hates them both. He hates them for having such plain names, so utterly impossible to find or track down. He hates the fact that he can’t help but analyze them every time he is looking down the barrel of a syringe. He hates the fact that he can’t find them, and that they have apparently made no special effort to find him.

Sherlock feels lost, and angry, and he pushes the drugs into his system, one dose at a time, until the world is less cruel.


	4. Chapter 4

When the man with the cheekbones tells John where to meet him, he almost doesn’t process the request.

His brain is too stuck on _Sherlock_.

He’s lucky Mike Stamford’s there, or he wouldn’t have caught the rest of the sentence. John is still reeling after, “The name’s Sherlock Holmes.”

John has never, in his life, met a man named Sherlock. He had begun to think (maybe even to hope) that the extra name on his wrist was a fluke, or one of those names people get sometimes that are from like a hundred years ago. There are stories about soulmates separated by decades, even centuries, and even though he had actually watched the name appear he had always wondered…

But was there really any reason to think that this man was the same Sherlock who was on his wrist? Apart from the rarity of the name. John couldn’t just assume.

Still, he is nervous and excited when he walks up to the flat that first day. He feels the way he had all those years ago when he met his first Mary. Except this time, instead of running away to his room, he’s running straight up, to learn more about this stranger with the same name as the person on his wrist.

Sherlock is incredibly frustrating at first. Half the time John wants to strangle him.

And yet, he’s curiously companionable, vulnerable in a way that John can’t help but notice. He’s self-absorbed and cruel, but he’s also funny and thoughtful and brilliant.

Within a week of meeting the man, John suffers through the scariest version of the shovel talk ever, gets his limp cured, and murders a man for Sherlock.

John thinks about telling Sherlock about the curly signature on his wrist. He’s certain that Sherlock has seen John’s tattoo, with Mary’s name surrounded by hearts and flowers. He wonders if Sherlock has deduced that, hiding underneath that ink, there’s a second name. He wonders if Sherlock suspects that the second name is his own.

He never gets the chance to ask.

* * *

 

Sometimes, Mary can’t help but laugh.

She’s finally found her John. Just after they’ve lost their Sherlock.

Mary doesn’t know why she didn’t avoid John Watson the way she had avoided all other Johns in her live. Maybe she was tired of running. Maybe the universe decided she’d had enough hard luck. Maybe it was fate.

Or maybe it was the way he slumped over at the bar, dry-eyed and stony and inconsolable about losing his soulmate before they ever got a chance.

Mary and John became friends through bartending, before they even knew each other’s names, and maybe that was the deciding factor. Maybe it was that Mary cared too much about the brokenness in the man to care that he was yet another John.

She remembers the way she froze when he signed off on his credit card. The looped J and the quick line, followed by a W and a blurred scribble. That looped J that was embedded into the skin on her own arm, with the thin white line of a scar running through it.

Mary rolls over and curls around John, reaching over him to gently trace the raised flesh of Sherlock on her fiancé’s left arm. Her own name is there, framed by flowers and hearts and birds, while Sherlock hides in the darkness of tattoo ink.

John mumbles something, and takes her right hand, pressing a gentle kiss to the place where Sherlock appears on her own arm. Mary clutches John tight, tangling her legs with his.

“I wish I could have met him,” she whispers. “Even just once. I used to dream about him, you know.”

John nods. “I wish you could have met him, too,” he whispers. “I wish I hadn’t been so stupid. We could’ve had everything. All of us.”

“Maybe that’s why we have two,” Mary says. “Maybe the world knew that we would lose him, and we would need each other.”

John rolls over and hugs her to his chest, burying his face in her hair. She returns the embrace, pressing her nose into the side of his neck. The tears are threatening to fall again, and she can tell from the drops on her shoulder that John is also crying.

They’re only one side of a triangle, a single line, but at least they’ve found each other at last.

* * *

 

Sherlock would almost believe that this is evidence that there is a higher power in the universe, and it is personally out to get him.

Why else would John Watson arrive on his metaphorical doorstep just after Sherlock had finally come to terms with the fact that he would never meet his soulmates and he could instead devote his time to solving crimes and puzzles.

John Watson with his doctor’s penmanship, his incredible loyalty, and the gorgeous tattoo on his left wrist which carefully framed the name Mary. A tattoo which left just enough space in the blackness for him to be hiding some other name.

John had been, without a doubt, the best thing that had ever happened to him, and Sherlock wanted him to be the one. To be his soulmate, _his_ John. For the Mary on his wrist (which Sherlock was never able to study closely) to be the same as the Mary on Sherlock’s wrist.  For them to find her, for everything to go perfectly.

And then Moriarty had come along and bollocksed everything up.

Sherlock doesn’t exactly stalk the new lovers. He can’t follow them around, or sit in the café across the street from them and watch their every move, much as he’d like to. There are too many more important things to worry about, not the least of them being John’s continued survival and safety. So instead he allows Mycroft to feed him the information that he has never let on that he wants, but his older brother has so cleverly deduced that he needs.

“They’ve moved in together,” Mycroft announces dryly one afternoon after Sherlock has finished up some rather messy business in Amsterdam. “And I believe they’ll be announcing their engagement sometime this week.”

“You know I don’t care about petty gossip, Mycroft,” Sherlock says, adjusting his cuffs, though he wants desperately to hear more about John and Mary.

Mycroft hums noncommittally. “I’ve also heard that they’ve announced they are soulmates. Their names apparently match up perfectly.”

Sherlock swallows. “Yes, that’s all well and good for them,” says Sherlock. “I thought we agreed that soulmates were a load of bollocks anyways?”

Mycroft leans forward, folding his hands. “They are, quite. But they do seem to make some people so happy, don’t they, Sherlock?”

Sherlock knows what his brother his implying. He knows he would be happy, to return to London and move back into the flat and live together with John and Mary. He doesn’t know for sure that they’re his soulmates, but they could be, conceivably, and even if they weren’t, he knows he loves John.

But he shrugs on his coat and turns away. He doesn’t have time for that, now.


	5. Chapter 5

John can’t decide whether he wants to kiss Sherlock or hit him.

He ends up deciding to hit him.

He ends up deciding to hit him _three times_.

John shouldn’t let his temper go like that. He doesn’t like the part of him that gets violent when he’s emotional, because he’s seen it in others and he knows that it can lead down the path to abuse. And he knows it’s even more problematic when he’s doing it to his probably-soulmate. His father had gotten like that sometimes, and he doesn’t want to be that man.

But the bastard had lied to him, allowed him to think he was dead for years, and John was angry, and part of him felt like the man deserved to feel just a bit of the pain that Sherlock had put him through for so long, even if his pain hadn’t been physical.

He doesn’t get the full story out of Sherlock, but he’s not entirely sure he wants the full story. Eventually, John decides that he needs some time to calm down, and he sends Sherlock away.

It’s only as he watches Mary walk up and speak gently to the curly-haired idiot that he realizes that he still needs to talk to Sherlock about being soulmates.

When Mary walks back after putting Sherlock and his bleeding nose into a taxi, she’s grinning. John raises his eyebrows at her.

“I like him,” she says. “I always thought I would, but it’s nice to know for sure.”

John can’t help but smile as she leans into him and he puts an arm around her. “He’s a right berk.”

“Absolutely,” she agrees, “and believe me, I’d like to lay one on him, too, for leaving us in the dark. But I’ve only just met him, and right now I’m just glad he’s alive.”

She tilts her head so that she can look up at him. “How are we gonna tell him?”

John laughs, slightly hysterical. “God, I have no idea, Mary. He’s probably already figured out.”

“But you do want him, right?” she says. “We want him to be part of … whatever this is.”

“You mean our marriage?” John says. “God, what are we going to do about that? We’ve got a date picked out and everything.”

Mary laughs, and hers is genuine. “Don’t you worry,” she says. “We’ll work something out. I’m pretty sure there’s something on the books about soulmate marriages and such.”

John rubs the cuff which is currently hiding the names of his soulmates. “I want him to be together with us,” he says.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “He will be.”

* * *

 

Mary finds that she isn’t actually surprised about how stupid John and Sherlock are about each other. After all, she knows that John has been religiously pretending that he doesn’t have two names on his wrist since Sherlock’s name appeared there, and she’s heard enough about how Sherlock deals with emotional relationships to be able to extrapolate how he’s going to dance around John.

But god _damn_ they are a pair of idiots. Her idiots, but idiots nonetheless.

Sherlock seems absolutely convinced that she and John are perfect just the way they are, and he’s deftly avoided all talk of soulmates beyond the very obvious fact that Mary and John are each other’s. Every now and then John will start to breach the subject, only for a flash of fear to appear in Sherlock’s eyes as he quickly derails the conversation.

Mary wonders what Sherlock is afraid of. Unless it’s the fear that Sherlock _isn’t_ the third part of their trio.

John still expresses that concern to her late at night, because apparently having the real Sherlock back in his life has made him insecure again.

“What if it’s another Sherlock?” John asks. “What if it’s just coincidence that I found this one? What if he doesn’t even have our names?”

“You really think there’s more than one Sherlock in the world?” she tries to point out. But John only says that it’s still a possibility, and they shouldn’t rush it.

But Mary doesn’t want to get married to John without Sherlock knowing how he fits in. And she’s certain that he does fit into this. She’s spent long enough waiting for a Sherlock to come around that she’s not going to let this one slip out of her grasp.

Mary’s the one who ends up breaking it to him in the end. She invites Sherlock out for coffee while she sent John to work, explaining that she wants to get to know her fiancé’s best friend a little bit better.

When they sit down at the café, she doesn’t beat around the bush. “I think you ought to know that John isn’t my only soulmate,” she says. “That’s not the only name on my arm.”

Sherlock’s eyes flick to her right cuff, and she really ought to stop being so surprised about his ability to deduce. Of _course_ he’d know which hand her soulmates’ names are written. He’d probably worked it out from the way she favored it or something.

“Indeed,” says Sherlock. “You realize that’s highly unusual? I’ve made a special study of soulmate complications, including some fascinating explorations of large age gaps and –“

Mary cuts him off. “Sherlock. You’re the other name.”

He tenses and looks down. “You can’t know that.”

“I know that Sherlock is a name that’s less common than having two names on your wrist,” she says. “And you know what else? John _also_ has a Sherlock on his wrist. So it seems to me that the three of us are meant to be together. So what I’m asking is, is there a John and a Mary on your wrist?”

Sherlock licks his lips. “You still can’t know for sure. Just because my name is rare doesn’t guarantee –“

“Well, there’s an easy way to find out, isn’t there?” says Mary, standing up. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?” says Sherlock, rising to follow her.

She touches the slim black cuff on his right wrist. “I think you’ll want to do this someplace a little more private.”

*

Sherlock can’t believe he’s standing here, with these two people. With his _soulmates_. It’s a wonderful, impossible dream he’d long given up on.

Of course, there had been some argument about the legality of a three-person marriage, but there had indeed been an old obscure law on the books about not preventing soulmates from being legally bound to one another, so they’d sorted that out well enough. Of course, it was so old it did mean they had to be _married_ and couldn’t just have some kind of civil partnership like Sherlock had been expecting.

They’d fought over the wedding. Sherlock still thinks these sort of civil ceremonies are tedious and frustrating, and that the whole concept of marriage as an institution is outdated, sexist, and quite frankly has rather terrifying implications. ‘Til death do us part?’ It’s quite a disturbing thought, to be tethered to any person for the entire length of your lifespans.

Not that he can imagine a time or a place where he wouldn’t want to be tied to the two beautiful people beside him, and he doesn’t think things will go wrong, but the principle is still a little unnerving.

So Mary had them all write their own vows, and now here they are, John and Sherlock in perfectly-tailored tuxedos, and Mary in her incredible white gown, ready to pledge themselves to each other.

John speaks first, clearly nervous. The three of them have clasped hands, and John’s is clammy and sweating. “Err, Mary, Sherlock,” he says. “From the day I first met the both of you, I knew you would change my life. And you each have, in different ways. You’re my soulmates, and it’s never been clearer to me that I was meant for you – and both of you for me. I love you, and I pledge to love you and guard you forever.”

Mary smiles and grips both of their hands a little more tightly. “Sherlock, John,” she says. “I’ve been waiting to find you since I was a little girl. Despite everything I’ve been through and all the disappointment I’ve had, all the times I’d given up hope, here you were waiting for me at the end. I swear to love each of you, to never set one of you above the other, and to be your loving wife.”

Then Sherlock clears his throat, his own hands a little unsteady. “ Weddings are a time for an exchange of vows. I’ve never made a vow in my life, and after today I never will again. So, here in front of you both, my first and last vow. Mary and John: whatever it takes, whatever happens, from now on I swear I will always be here, always, for all three of us.”

Before he can even finish his last sentence, Mary is already moving. She reaches out to cup the back of his neck and pulls him in for a kiss. Sherlock feels slightly numb.

Then John leans in to kiss Mary, and Sherlock can hardly believe that he’s met two such incredible people, and not only has he met them, but they wanted to marry him. And before he can finish marveling, his neck is once more touched as this time John pulls him in for a kiss.

There’s thunderous applause from their family and friends, but Sherlock can barely hear it, wrapped up as he is in his soulmates’ eyes. Tonight there will be food and dancing and music, and he will play the violin for them.

And this evening they will go back to their hotel room, and he will fall asleep a married man.

Sherlock couldn’t be happier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we are, all finished! Thanks again to my amazing beta [IWantYourMusicPlease](http://archiveofourown.org/users/IWantYourMusicPlease/pseuds/IWantYourMusicPlease), who read every chapter before it was posted!
> 
> I'm... considering writing a smutty sequel, but I'm very bad at writing porn, so it probably won't happen. (Others are free to explore the wedding night if they so choose!)
> 
> And yeah, I'm aware the timelines are off from the show - but I figure in a universe where John and Mary know they're meant for each other, they might be a little more quick to get married.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!


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